Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  Toward the end of elementary school, the impression of wholeness started slipping. We were told not to watch Disney movies, because Disney World had allowed gay people to host a parade. In fifth grade, my Rapture-obsessed Bible teacher confiscated my Archie comics and my peace-sign notebook, replacing this heathen paraphernalia with a copy of the brand-new bestseller Left Behind. A girl at our school died by electrocution when a pool light blew out into the water, and the tragedy was deemed the absolute will of the Lord. Around this time, television screens were installed all over campus, and the face of our folksy, robotic pastor bobbed around on them, preaching to no one. At chapel, we were sometimes shown religious agitprop videos, the worst of which featured a handsome dark-haired man bidding his young son farewell in a futuristic white chamber, and then, as violins swelled in the background, walking down an endless hall to be executed—martyred for his Christian faith. I cried, because—please—I wasn’t heartless! Afterward we all sang a song called “I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb.”

  In middle school, I became aware of my ambivalence—just distant enough to be troubled by the fact that I felt distant. I started to feel twinges of guilt at the end of every church service, when the pastor would call for people to come forward and accept Jesus: what if this feeling of uncertainty meant that I needed to avow Him again and again? I didn’t want to be a bad person, and I especially didn’t want to spend eternity in hell. I’d been taught that my relationship with God would decay if I wasn’t careful. I wasn’t predestined, I wasn’t chosen: if I wanted God’s forgiveness, I had to work. I started getting agoraphobic in the Worship Center on Sundays. Thinking about these intimate matters in such a crowded public place felt indecent. I took breaks from services, sometimes curling up on the couches in the corridor outside where mothers shushed their infants, or walking up to the highest balcony to pass the time reading the psychedelic book of Revelation in the blissfully unsupervised pews.

  One Sunday, I told my parents I needed a sweater from the car. I walked out across the big, echoing atrium with the keys jangling from my hand and our pastor’s voice ringing through the empty space. In the parking lot, the asphalt festered, softening; the sun burned out my eyes. I got into the passenger seat of our powder-blue Suburban and put the key in the ignition. The Christian radio station was playing—89.3 KSBJ, with its slogan “God listens.” I mashed the Seek button, hitting country, alt-rock, the Spanish stations, and then something I had never heard before. It was the Box, Houston’s hip-hop radio station, playing what they always played on Sundays—chopped and screwed.

  * * *

  —

  Houston, like its megachurches, is unfathomably sprawling. Even from an airplane it’s impossible to clock the whole city at once. It’s low and flat, just a few dozen feet above sea level, and its endless freeways—the two huge concentric loops of 610 and Beltway 8, and the four highways that intersect at the center, slicing the circle into eighths—trace nineteenth-century market routes, forming the shape of a wagon wheel around downtown. The Greater Houston Area covers ten thousand square miles—that’s as big as New Jersey—and contains six million people. The city is less than an hour from the Gulf Coast, with the alien-civilization oil refineries of Port Arthur and the ghost piers that rise out of Galveston’s dirty water, and there’s a certain irradiated spirit to everything, a big-money lawlessness that bleaches in the heat.

  The weather in Houston is frequently scorching, and as with much of Texas, an undercurrent of proud, ambitious independence thrums through the air. As a result, there isn’t much of a true public sphere in Houston. Even the thriving arts scene, alternately gala-esque or grungy, is mostly known to itself. Our ideas of the collective are limited by what our minds can see and handle: this is part of the reason Houstonians gravitate to megachurches, which provide the impression of living in a normal-size town. By some metrics, Houston is the most diverse city in America. It’s also a deeply segregated one, with a long history of its wealthy white population quietly exploiting minorities in order to shore up the city’s vaunted quality of life. For decades, Houston’s government placed its garbage dumps in black neighborhoods, many of which bordered downtown. The city is currently expanding at a dizzying pace—an estimated thirty thousand new houses are built every year. But the interchange between its many populations is acknowledged mostly in matters of unspoken structure. There are no zoning laws, which means that strip clubs sit next to churches, gleaming skyscrapers next to gap-toothed convenience stores. The freeways are, in effect, the only truly public space in the city—the only arena where people come out of their enclaves to be next to one another, sitting in the prodigious traffic, riding the spokes of Houston’s big wheel.

  At the same time that I was making salvation bracelets on the floor of Bible class, a universe was coming into being on the south side of town. In the mid-eighties, the Texas Southern University radio station started airing a show called Kidz Jamm, where high school students played Afrika Bambaataa and Run-DMC. In 1986, James Prince founded Rap-A-Lot Records, Houston’s first hip-hop label, and developed the Geto Boys, a gangster rap group that was hometown loyal (“Today’s special is Geto Dope, processed in Fifth Ward Texas”) and psychotically game. (The cover of the Geto Boys’ 1991 album We Can’t Be Stopped features a real photo of one of its members, three-foot-eight Bushwick Bill, on a gurney with his eye missing. Bushwick Bill had done PCP, decided to commit suicide so his mom could collect life insurance, and goaded his girlfriend—or, in some versions of the story, his mom—to shoot him in the face; he was pronounced dead at the hospital, but then, according to legend, came back to life in the morgue, reportedly due to the blood-flow-slowing effects of the PCP. A later Geto Boys album would be titled The Resurrection.)

  The Houston sound that took over the city in the nineties and later altered the national hip-hop landscape was developed in nondescript suburban houses, cheap bungalows behind patchy lawns and wire fences, in a handful of harshly bland neighborhoods—Sunnyside, South Park, Gulfgate—south of 610 and west of 45. Most of the original guard of Houston rappers came out of the south side, though a smaller north-side scene would soon develop, and UGK, possibly the best-known Houston act, came out of Port Arthur, which is an hour east. UGK had a kinetic country sophistication, agile and authoritative. Houston rappers like Z-Ro, Lil’ Keke, Lil’ Troy, Paul Wall, and Lil’ Flip patented a flossy, up-front, narcotized, ominous sort of bang and sparkle—it all sounded like an Escalade vibrating under the influence, like someone pulling up in a car with spinners and rolling down the window really slow. But if the Houston sound belongs to anyone, it’s not to a rapper. It’s to Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw.

  DJ Screw was born in 1971, in a town outside Austin, to a trucker father and a mother who held three cleaning jobs and bootlegged cassette tapes from her record collection for extra cash. Like a lot of Houston rappers, Screw played an instrument as a kid—piano, in his case. He taught himself how to DJ with a cousin, who observed his habit of physically scratching up records and gave him the name DJ Screw. He moved to Houston, dropped out of high school, and started DJing at a south-side skating rink. (Skating rinks served, in Houston, as one of many junior iterations of the club.) Screw, quiet and private, round-faced in oversize T-shirts with a guarded look in his eyes, made mixtapes obsessively. The first time he slowed the tempo down to his signature wooze, it was an accident; it was 1989, and he’d hit the wrong button on the turntable. Then a friend gave him $10 to record an entire tape at that sludgy tempo, and Screw did it again and again. The sound caught. He started recording Houston rappers over his mixtapes—directing their long, fluid sessions as he mixed, and then slowing the whole tape down, making it skip beats and stutter, making it sound like your heart was about to stop. Screw made copies of his mixtapes on gray bulk cassettes from Sam’s Club, which he labeled by hand and sold out of his house. To get on a Screw tape was to be knighted; Screw’s collective, th
e Screwed Up Click, quickly became a local hall of fame.

  Soon everyone wanted Screw tapes. People started coming to his house from all over the city, then all over the state, then beyond. Neighbors assumed Screw was a drug dealer. The police swooped in a few times, performing mostly fruitless raids. There were any number of better ways for Screw to get his music to people—a local hip-hop distribution company called Southwest Wholesale had sprung up to take advantage of the thriving independent market that Houston provided for its artists—but Screw insisted on this inefficient hand-to-hand, doing everything in cash with no bank account, hiring friends as security, selling cassettes for two hours each night in his driveway with cars lining up around the block. He could never meet the demand for his music. According to Michael Hall’s intensively reported chronicle in Texas Monthly, frustrated record-store owners started buying directly from bootleggers in bulk. In 1998, Screw finally set up a semi-official shop, establishing Screwed Up Records behind bulletproof glass in a store near South Park. Nothing was for sale except those cassettes.

  By this point, a decade into Screw’s career, he was famous outside Houston. Chopped and screwed, the style he invented, had permeated the scene. Michael “5000” Watts, a north-side producer and cofounder of Swishahouse Records, adopted the sound; his Swishahouse partner OG Ron C picked it up, too. Watts DJed on Sundays for 97.9, the Box, the hip-hop station that had taken over in the nineties, leaking chopped and screwed to a wider Houston audience. By then, Screw’s prodigious output was flagging. He was getting heavier and slower, as if his body had started working at his signature tempo. He had become addicted to codeine cough syrup, also known as lean.

  Lean is now permanently associated with rappers, partly because of the Houston scene at its most flamboyant—the grills, rims, and sizzurp aesthetic—and partly because of notable acolytes of the substance, like Lil Wayne. But drugs are always demographically flexible. Townes Van Zandt, the melancholy country blues artist who got his break in Houston, loved cough syrup so much that he called it Delta Momma (DM, as in Robitussin) and sang one song (1971’s “Delta Momma Blues”) from the genial point of view of the drug itself. Chopped and screwed mimics the lean feeling—a heady and dissociative security, as if you’re moving very slowly toward a conclusion you don’t need to understand. It induces a sense of permissive disorientation that melds perfectly to Houston, a place where a full day can pass without you ever seeming to get off the highway, where the caustic gleam of daytime melts into a fluorescent polluted sunset and then into a long and swampy night. Chopped and screwed picked up something about Houston that connects impurity to absolution. It was its own imaginary freeway, oozing with syrup, defining the city’s limits, bounding it like the Loop.

  In the blistering hot parking lot of the megachurch, on the old seats of my parents’ powder-blue Suburban, chopped and screwed sounded right to me as soon as I heard it, even though it would be years before I began to understand the context in which it was produced. Like religion, it provided both ends of a total system. Its sound entangled sin and salvation; it held a tug of unease, a blanket of reassurance. It was as ominous and comforting as a nursery rhyme, this first taste of the way that an open acknowledgment of vice can feel as divinely willed, as spiritual—even more so—than the concealment often required to be good.

  Or maybe Houston just crossed too many of my signals. It wasn’t long until the city’s music permeated even my sheltered environment. There was a lack of zoning in our cultural lives, too. I first learned about twerking when I was thirteen, at cheerleading camp, where we got measured for navy bell skirts with high slits that barely cleared our underwear, which we were required to wear on football game days to our modesty-preaching Christian school. At camp we prayed that Jesus would keep us safe during practice, and then we threw one another, with sloppy abandon, ten feet into the air. Southern rap was rising: after school we danced around each other’s bedrooms, listening to Outkast, listening to Nelly, listening to Ludacris and T.I. We dropped to the floor, clumsily mimicking the motions that were spreading like a virus, clapping for the girls who could do it best. We still went to church twice a week, and it all started to seem interchangeable. Some nights I went with my girlfriends to youth group and sang about Jesus, and sometimes I would go with them to the club on teen night, driving past the Repentagon into the thicket of liquor stores and strip clubs a mile up on Westheimer, entering another dark room where all the girls wore miniskirts and everyone sought amnesty in a different form. Sometimes a foam machine would open up in the ceiling and soak our cheap push-up bras, and we’d glue ourselves to strangers as everyone chewed on the big mouthfuls of Swishahouse in the room.

  We had been taught that even French kissing was dangerous—that anything not marked by rich white Christianity was murky and perverse. But eventually, it was the church that seemed corrupted to me. What had been forbidden began to feel earnest and clean. It was hot out the first time I tasted cough syrup, on a night when everyone had come home from college. I drank it from a big Styrofoam cup with ice, booze, and Sprite. Soon afterward I was in my friend’s pool, wading through hip-high water. “Overnight Celebrity” was playing, a song that always made me emotional—Miri Ben-Ari replaying the strings from that tender soul song, Twista yammering on with an auctioneer’s devotion. Suddenly the song sounded like it would never end—like it had been screwed down to the Sunday tempo, like it was thick enough to carry me. The water felt like I could grab it. The sky was enormous, eternal, velvet. I looked up, the stars blanketed by the perpetual glow of pollution, and felt as blessed as I ever did when I was a child.

  * * *

  —

  I have been walking away from institutional religion for a long time now—half my life, at this point, fifteen years dismantling what the first fifteen built. But I’ve always been glad that I grew up the way I did. The Repentagon trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme environments, a skill I wouldn’t give up for anything, and Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick. Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality. And Christian theology convinced me that I had been born in a compromised situation. It made me want to investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good.

  This spiritual inheritance was, in fact, what initially spurred my defection: I lost interest in trying to reconcile big-tent Southern evangelicalism with my burgeoning political beliefs. I hated the prosperity gospel, which had taught many rich white Christians to believe—albeit politely, and with generous year-end donations to various ministries—that wealth was some sort of divine anointment, that they were genuinely worth more to God and country than everyone else. (Under this doctrine, as in Texas in general, inequality is framed as something close to deliberate: if you’re poor, that’s unfortunate, because God must have ordained that, too.) People at my school were so cocooned within whiteness that they often whispered the words “Mexican” and “black,” instinctively assuming those descriptions were slurs. I read the Gospel to be constantly preaching economic redistribution—John the Baptist commands, in the book of Luke, “Let him who has two tunics share with him who has none,” et cetera—but everyone around me seemed mainly to believe in low taxes and the unconditional righteousness of war. The fear of sin often seemed to conjure and perpetuate it: abstinence education led to abortions, for rich people, and for poor people to children who would be loved and supported until the day they were born. There was so much beatific kindness, and it was so often undergirded by brittle cruelty. (In 2015, the church’s longtime pastor spoke out against the “deceptive and deadly” Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which would have allowed transgender people to use the bathroom that matched their gender identity. After the 2018 midterms, he called the Democratic Party “some kind of religion that is basically godless.” In 2019, th
e Houston Chronicle published an investigation into seven hundred sexual assault cases at Southern Baptist churches over the previous two decades. In the piece, leaders at my church were criticized for allegedly mishandling sexual abuse accusations in two cases that resulted in lawsuits—one in 2010, involving a youth pastor, and the other in 1994, involving a man who was contracted to coordinate youth music productions. In an unrelated affidavit from 1992, our pastor, who at the time was the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, declined to testify in a lawsuit against an admitted child molester who had worked as a youth pastor at a church in Conroe. The SBC, he wrote, had no organizational authority over any of its associated churches, which operated autonomously. He added that he did not “hold an opinion as to the proper handling of any claims of sexual abuse by church members against their members,” and that any testimony on this subject would “unfavorably affect [his] television ministry, which now is seen on a daily basis in the greater Houston area.”)

  Texas in the early aughts was palpably hegemonic. George W. Bush was adorable, and the Patriot Act made him a hero; there were, without question, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Public demonstrations of faith often doubled as performances of superiority and dominance. One year, a troupe of Christian bodybuilders regularly appeared at chapel to rip apart phone books as a demonstration of the strength we could acquire through Jesus. At Halloween, the church put on a “Judgment House,” a walk-through haunted-house play in which the main character drank beer at a party and then kept sinning and wound up in hell.

  Severing ties to these theatrics was easy. But for some time afterward, I retained an intense hunger for devotion itself. For about five years—the end of high school, the beginning of college—I turned my attention inward, tried to build a church on the inside, tried to understand faith as something that could draw me closer to something overwhelming and pure. I kept a devotional journal, producing a record of spiritual longing that was fierce and jagged and dissolving. I pleaded for things I still find very recognizable. Help me to not put on an act of any kind, I wrote. I told God that I wanted to live in accordance with my beliefs, that I wanted to diminish my own sense of self-importance, that I was sorry for not being better, and that I was grateful for being alive. It’s hard to draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose and aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in, I wrote, between entries where I tried to understand if it was inherently wrong to get drunk. (At my school, you could be expelled for character-based spiritual offenses such as partying, being gay, or getting pregnant.) I stood between both sides of my life, holding the lines that led to them, trying to engage with a tension that I stopped being able to feel. Eventually, almost without realizing it, I let one side go.